Just last night I finally managed to get the old pilgrim forums converted from PHPBB2 to the Drupal content management system.

We got a LOT of spam signups on the old forum and any genuine registrations were getting lost in the noise. Plus there were a whole bunch of things the forums could have done with doing better. Simple sharing of pilgrim-related content for instance.

Well Drupal can do all that and is free and open-source. I've been using it on a few other projects for a bit now and have been quite impressed by what's possible with it.

I'd been trying to convert the forums for a little while but hadn't had any joy and then it just worked \o/

Anyhow the new forums is at the URL below, any existing logins should work and new members are welcome too.

I've added functionality to share pilgrim-related content - projects, filters, layers etc and whilst it's still very much in testing it does seem to work.

Hopefully this could become something like a final showcase of what is/was possible in pilgrim before it slips into obscurity forever.

 Ok, well the idea with Lightning Dogs DVDs was to make the loops from the shop available to use for DVD customers.

As it actually turned out I may have got a bit carried away with the old button-twiddling and whilst the original aim was met, the project seems to have gone a bit beyond the initial spec.

I've had a number of people ask when I'm when going to release the loops for lightning dogs...and after I got over my initial confusion I realised that whilst the source loops are already are on sale, what you see in the 'dogs dvds probably goes a bit beyond what's
feasible on the average live setup..hence these backdrops.



So whilst the original project *was* actually created in real-time in Pilgrim using the loops from the shop, it was all done at 640x480 and output at PAL and even there my playback machine struggled and needed dedicated disks and whatnot. In the end we only used that
setup to find the mix "combos" which worked.

Each actual combo was then re-created offline from the Loop DV-masters, where possible at 2xPal resolution (1440x1152). then it was assembled into the DVD, also edited at 2xPAL.

The displacement-based mixing is effectively a surface-deformation so is applied at the (higher) editing resolution. That way you actually get pin-sharp 2xPAL out even though you only put two PAL clips in.

With the Multiply-based combos there was nothing to gain by upping the resolution so they stayed at PAL. With them it's about the colours anyway.

In any case it's a bit of a mixture and there's plenty of ones at 2xPAL if there's any interest in them. They do kinda rock at 2xpal projected on a wall ;)

So basically I'm not sure which of these you'll like, but there's exactly 100 of them, these are the first ten.

Because of the amount of detail in some of them I had to increase the compression quality of ALL formats to 90% or above to avoid losing detail.

This means some slightly bigger file-sizes and potentially more disk usage so if you're interested it could be wise to test with a couple and see if it works ok before downloading the lot.


As usual they're all in the backdrops folder of the shop starting at 20p. They're exactly 3mins long and fade in from black and out to black. They won't mess you up with any sudden movements or disappearing acts.

Not all of the 100 were in the DVDs but there were so many I just had to leave some out or we'd have ended up with a box-set.

The Lightning Dogs backdrops are here.

I'm going to start adding them to the shop as normal backdrops but if you're interested in the higher resolution versions then join the list below:




Happy Downloading :)

 Whilst things have been quiet on the news front I have not been idle. Among other things I've been working on converting the old pilgrim forums from phpbb2 to drupal.

We get a lot of spam registrations and I think a few real ones get lost in the noise. Drupal has much better spam-protection than that old version of phpbb and also has a lot more scope for posting of user-generated content.

Since there's not many pilgrim-users left it might be good to have somewhere to show the work which IS still being done in it.

 A fellow Pilgrim user has got his site up and running - early days yet but keep an eye on it, should be some good stuff on there :)

alphabomb.com

 sorry it's been a while but our printing issues are now sorted and I'm pleased to be able to tell you that our postal orders are finally back online.

In the process I've also added postal versions of Lightning Dogs 1 & 2, and also Backdrops-1 so that's hopefully the whole lot covered.

Get them here

 Postal orders will be offline while I'm travelling for a couple of weeks. Downloads and VJ content should not be affected and there should still be regular email support. Normal service will resume as soon as I'm back in the UK.

 Although it's not of interest to most people, there's still a hardcore group of pilgrim users and recently the forums for this software went down.

The authors are no longer developing or supporting the code and whilst the site going down doesn't appear to have been a planned occurance, as far as I know there are no plans to resurrect it.

The problem is that the forum was basically the "other half" of the documentation - with many tricks and techniques which never made it to the manual.

spoke to one of the developers who sent me a backup fo the forum database and whilst I'm no linux ninja I've managed to get the forums up and running again.

It's still in testing and isn't running terribly quickly but it it alive and once it's proven stable will be moved to a quicker location.

All the existing logins of active users should work but the database was badly clogged with spam users so any inactive/non-approved users got canned.

If your user account was inactive at the time of the forum going down you might need to drop me a mail to see if I can salvage it from the sql backup.

Otherwise - it's up and grooving, subscription semails etc all work so hopefuilly see a few familiar faces (nicks?) on there...

 Our downloads are back online (DVD, as well as VJ content). A few of the DVDs aren't yet across but they're being added to the shop one by one as they drop in.

As you may have noticed, we've had some pretty serious bandwidth issues recently with my server host, and we're finally across on a new server.

It's a bit further west than anticipated (Houston,TX) but it seems to be on a pretty fast connection and we shouldn't run into any bandwidth-allowance issues.

I wasn't sure about the latency but it's already quicker than we were getting from the Isle of Man so fingers and so far the speed seems good.

it's also now on a 100mbps uplink instead of a 10mb, so hopefully a double improvement.

Our USA customers should hopefully see markedly improved speeds. I got a steady 8.5mb/sec (68mbps) on a test download from microsoft server which, although it's likely to be the highest speed I'm likely to see out of the box, is still impressive. None of my servers so far have come close to that sort of speed.

Unfortunately this has been a massive disruption in service for us and our customers, both in terms of the lack of availabilty of downloadable content, as well as the extra work (and cost) involved in moving to a new location.

I apologise for any inconvenience and any slow downloads of sample DVDs, loopsdemos etc.

We've literally been moving data non-stop since the issue was flagged two weeks ago (thanks J), but it's only been going at a paltry 200kb/sec, and I'm pretty sure occupying the line has affected the webserver performance overall... but hey - we're nearly there now :)

Thanks for your patience in the mean time and hopefully you see a speed improvement from the new location.

 If you're a user of the Pilgrim Forums then yuou may have noticed the site went down recently.

As far as I know this was not planned but there is no plan to resurrect it in its current form.

I've what is hopefully a viable backup of the phpbb forums so the plan is to revive it but it may be a week or two while I make sure that the current backup is viable and actually set up some suitable hosting.

I've set up a mailing list/newsletter for just this topic, so if you want to know when it's back up (or whatever happens) then please signup below. Once you send the form check your email for a confirmation message, then click the link in it. Until you click the link you're not subscribed.

If you are an existing forum member please add your forum name so I know who you are.

 Well it looks like there was a misunderstanding with my new ISP on the specs fo the network connection we're on which is resulting in me moving servers again.

What I thought was a 10mbps pipe just for this site actually has about 40 other server on it too, and we've keeping that connection pretty much flat out the whole time which isn't really working out well for us or the rest of the servers on our network segment.

So we're on the move again, this time to Houston Texas - it's the only place I've found which talks in TB/month transfer allowance rather than GB/month.

Despite being on the other side of the pond from the UK the connection seems pretty fast and stable and there should be no way we'll be annoying our neighbours by using the whole connection. This time we're on a 100mbps uplink (rather than 10mbps) with a whopping 10TB/month transfer allowance... which should be plenty ;)

Speeds in the UK seem respectable - and certainly no slower than the current box, and the speeds within the USA seem seriously quick. A test download from Micro$oft to the server settled at 8.5mb/sec - that's megaBYTES per sec not megaBITS....I've never seen speeds like that on a hosted box!

the downloads are temporarily offline while we move to the new location, please bear with us while we sort this out.

Apologies for the inconvenience, thanks for your patience :)